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Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

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Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#241

Post by tptacek »

Pharmakon wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not fraud. A key element of fraud (civil and criminal) is that the accused knowingly misled, and to prove that you'd need to prove that there is no reasonable interpretation of what they said that they could have believed was true.

With Google they offer enough data points to analyze for just such intent. In the absence of intent fraud is out of the question, but a jury might be convinced that a persistent pattern of incompetence which is brought to Google’s attention again and again without change meets the bar of fraud, especially in a civil court with the mere preponderance of the evidence standard. The post-banning behavior of automated res…

Prosecutors don't make civil cases. I mean, all this is silly, but start there.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#242

Post by p2t2p »

Animats wrote: post #193

The real threat to Google will come when someone sues over this behavior as an antitrust case. This is part of "supply chain" antitrust law. It's sometimes called a "refusal to supply", where a manufacturer refuses to sell to a retailer. That's legal if it is not "part of a predatory or exclusionary strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly."[1] If you're the only supplier of something, antitrust law starts to apply…

The saddest part is that such behaviour will bring full power of regulation on all of us, just like GDPR did. Sooner or later lawmakers will come after all of us because of neglect of that sort.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#243

Post by ThrustVectoring »

ben_jones wrote: post #91
gambiting wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically how it works. It costs you very little(couple hundred £ at most) to ask a lawyer to craft a letter to send to Google legal team saying they have to resolve the issue for you within 14 days or you will be taking them to court. And if there's one thing that's absolutely certain is that Google's law team's time is way more expensive than whatever lawyer you found to write a letter or two is going to cha…

Or Google might realize acquiescing to every small legal request might become untenable and create a policy of only giving in to well-funded threats.

That's why you buy a lawyer to craft the letter - so it looks indistinguishable from threats with actual funding behind it.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#244

Post by technics256 »

This also happened to me, and I have no idea why. I'm making a Healthcare app using react native, and got banned spontaneously as well. No recourse, nothing. No ability to change anything.

I'm making sure all of my resources are spent on AWS and Microsoft services. Never again for Google.

And thankfully, physicians prefer iPhones over Android by a large margin.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#245

Post by Pharmakon »

tptacek wrote: post #241
Pharmakon wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Google they offer enough data points to analyze for just such intent. In the absence of intent fraud is out of the question, but a jury might be convinced that a persistent pattern of incompetence which is brought to Google’s attention again and again without change meets the bar of fraud, especially in a civil court with the mere preponderance of the evidence standard. The post-banning behavior of automated res…

Prosecutors don't make civil cases. I mean, all this is silly, but start there.

That second half of my post was not in relation to a civil case, which I think was painfully obvious given the reference to MS. Did you really misunderstand?

As in the case of MS back in the day, it can seem like the law is just disinterested, but the law is merely unbelievably slow and equally inevitable. The day some prosecutors can make a career out of taking on Google, they will, and by then Google will be fully on the wrong side of public opinion.

That is pretty damned unambiguous, unless you found as in the case of MS... confusing. If you want to explain what you found “silly” I’m open to reading your perspective of course.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#246

Post by xigency »

avip wrote: post #112
noonespecial wrote: post #27

The question I always have with this stuff is this: To attract developers, these platforms make some promises. A "review" process for supposed violations of TOS causing cancellations is always among them. But to me these "reviews" always seem either completely faked or some version of a lowest-level employee simply restating that the algo has made its choice and they are powerless. More incriminating is that every ti…

So says you. This is what the ToS say: Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to…

This agreement requires 30 days notice if your agreement is not terminated for breach of terms. So in the case that you have a dispute, they could in fact be in breach of the terms without that 30 days notice. E.g. They can't just say "we don't want to do business with you anymore starting now," at least from this clause.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#248

Post by avip »

SiVal wrote: post #225
avip wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So says you. This is what the ToS say: Google may terminate this Agreement with You for any reason with thirty (30) days' prior written notice. In addition, Google may, at any time, immediately suspend or terminate this Agreement with You if: (a) You have breached any provision of this Agreement, any non-disclosure agreement or other agreement relating to Google Play or the Android platform; (b) Google is required to…

Caprices of TOS details, reviews, algorithms, service quality, or whatever are not the real problem. The real problem is when you can't reasonably choose to do business with someone else and move on, as they are free to do with you. Network effects are causing more and more important things to both expand into great significance and to be dominated by a single company (or pair of gatekeepers, both of whom must be app…

Sounds like you’d like to see Google classified as a class II common carrier...

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#249

Post by mevile »

BEEdwards wrote: post #178
zmmmmm wrote: post #149

This is awful and I feel terrible for them, but a lot of alarm bells went off when I read this: I then attempted to login to my ‘Google Developer Account’ for the first time. Previous to this our app developers were the only ones to access our account to upload and update our app for us It sounds like they violated probably one of the first requirements of the ToS not to share account credentials. From there ... real…

"From there ... really anything goes as to what that developer could have done with those credentials intentionally or otherwise." They paid them to make the app though, they could put literally anything in there and even with them sending them builds that they uploaded themselves it would have been just as easy to be nefarious so this justification is thin at best. Are there shared accounts in the google app scene o…

You can share account access with other accounts. There is a Users & Permissions panel in the Google Play Console you can use to invite new members. There's no need to share your password with other people.

Re: Google terminated our business via our Google Play Developer Account

#250

Post by ratsmack »

ryanhuff wrote: post #221
confounded wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google’s customers are advertisers, not app developers.

Google took money from the developer in exchange for the performance of a service. The developer is a customer of Google's.

I believe the point parent was trying to make is that advertisers are more valuable customers while app developers, as customers, are expendable.
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